PHILADELPHIA — Kemba Walker is just hours away from the official start of his ninth NBA season and first with the Boston Celtics.
Walker established himself as a top-shelf talent in this league years ago, but the audience to witness his growth and evolution was relatively small because he starred in a small NBA market for a team with limited success. And the interest level was low because frankly, the same could be said for the expectations for success.
But that’s all in the past now that Walker plays for the Boston Celtics, a team that is considered among the upper-tier teams in the Eastern Conference.
With that kind of perceived positioning comes a level of expectations unlike anything Walker has experienced in his eight seasons in Charlotte.
In that time, Walker has only been to the playoffs twice and each time the Hornets were the lower seed and soon found themselves bounced out of the first round.
But in Boston, the Celtics are likely to have home-court advantage once the playoffs arrive, which will be yet another first for Walker.
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Getting a chance to lead a more talented team and do so on a larger, more grander stage than he has in the past, is part of what makes his role with the Celtics such a special one — and one that’s entirely new and refreshing to him at the same time.
“This is what I wanted, the opportunity I wanted,” Walker said. “I’m happy to be here.”
And the Celtics are thrilled to call the former UConn star one of their own as well.
When it became increasingly more clear that Kyrie Irving was not coming back to Boston, the Celtics began to look into potential replacements. The news that the Hornets were not going to max-out Walker after he was named to the All-NBA’s Third Team, qualifying him for a supermax contract, was just enough of an opening for the Celtics to swoop in and convince the 29-year-old Walker to come to Boston.
Walker does indeed have a different kind of responsibility now compared to when he was in Charlotte.
The Hornets were consistently in the mode of building towards being a playoff-caliber team, but in Boston, getting to the postseason isn’t enough to satisfy the appetite of Celtics fans.
While Philadelphia and Milwaukee have earned the right to be the teams everyone in the East is focused on trying to knock off, Boston is still expected to be in the mix.
And a good chunk of the responsibility for making that happen has to fall upon the shoulders of Walker.
His teammates aren’t overly concerned with how he’ll handle the weight of expectations.
“Kemba’s a pro. He’ll be fine,” Boston’s Marcus Smart told NBC Sports Boston earlier this month. “He’s probably feeling a little more pressure to win here, and that’s fine. We all are; we come in expecting to compete and win games everyday so he fits right into what we all want, what we all feel and who we are as a team. Like I said, Kemba’s gonna be fine.”
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